Judas Did Nothing Wrong

Happy Maundy Thursday!

Today is Maundy Thursday, which is the anniversary for the first instance of Jesus-vore.¹ On top of that it’s also the anniversary for Judas betraying Jesus, leading to the crucifixion (tomorrow) and the resurrection (on the third day). Seeing as I consider myself a Christian, I thought it would be in order to do a post on theme. Thus I want to explore the question of whether Judas actually acted wrongly when he kissed Jesus on the cheek and led him to his death—something that’s often presumed.

Before doing this, it’s probably in order to refresh you on the story of what happened. We’ll be assuming that the Christian story is actually true for the purposes of this, so I hope my non-Christian readers will be able to suspend disbelief. Anyways, the story goes something like this:²

And it came to pass, that Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon Iscariot, did conspire with the chief priests and the elders, that he might betray Christ for thirty pieces of silver (or maybe because he was possessed of Satan, who knows).

And he spake unto them, saying, “The one whom I shall kiss, the same is he; lay hold on him.”

And after that the disciples had eaten the body of Christ (albeit not all of it), and had drunk of his blood (albeit not to the last drop), they went forth to stroll leisurely, and to pray, in the Garden of Gethsemane, that holy place.

Now when the time was come—as Jesus well knew, for he was the Messiah, and the betrayal was not hidden from him—Judas drew nigh, and kissed him upon the cheek, in a manner not adulterous, for he was not gay.

Whereupon the elders of the Jews beheld him, and perceiving that this man was verily the Christ, did command their men that they should take him.

Then Simon Peter, seeing Malchus, a servant of the high priest, spake, saying, “‘Tis Peterin’ time,” and he petered upon him mightily, and smote off his ear.

But Jesus, full of mercy, forgave Malchus, and restored unto him his ear. And thereafter was Jesus crucified in a most grievous and painful manner for our sins, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

—Gospel of Silas 14:4-11

“‘Tis Peterin’ time”

Objective Wrongness

So that’s the gist of things: Judas betrayed Jesus for very little reason, knowingly leading him to his death. That seems pretty wrong. I mean, what if we kissed in the Garden of Gethsemane (aha ha, just kidding… 😅(unless?😳)), and you knew it’d lead to my painful torture and death. Then I’d be pretty mad about it, and you’d have obviously acted wrongly.

The problem is that on the Christian story, the story doesn’t end there. Rather the torture and death of Jesus led to, like, the best thing to ever happen, given it did—the biggest if true—namely the salvation of a whole bunch of people who (presumably) wouldn’t have been saved otherwise. If you’re a wicked ECT-believer these people were saved from, well, eternal conscious torment. But even a Chad universalist Christian will presumably still think that this was somehow necessary for all to be in perfect union with God or whatever, which I hear is a pretty good thing.

So Judas certainly did the right thing on consequentialist grounds. In fact—assuming his actions were a necessary part of the atonement—that kiss on the cheek might just have been one of the single highest value actions in the history of ever. Thus Judas is more than redeemed here.

But inferior moralities may care about things like “iNtEnTiOnS” and whatnot. Sure, if you’re one of *them* that might play into your evaluation—and Judas certainly had pretty rotten intentions. However even for people who care about intentions and the like, there should be some threshold (even if vague) of consequences where these considerations are overridden. For example, any plausible moral theory would surely have the result that I could intentionally kill one person to save every single person in the world, including that person.

Now consider the consequences of what Judas did. This is surely like the paradigm example of consequences outweighing deontic or virtue-based constraints. Positive infinite utility—or at least very large positive utility—for many people, if not every person ever. No matter how bad your intentions are, that’s surely still the right thing to do; if anything can outweigh bad intentions, this can.

Waaaait a minute… The section I’m currently writing had a title, didn’t it? It said something like “objective wrongness,” right? Yeah it did! Might this have something to do with the fact that I’ve so far only been talking about the actual rightness of the action, rather than what Judas had reason to believe the rightness would be? [This is just a ploy by the author, as he was aware of this throughout writing the section, and had it all planned beforehand.]

After all, you may object, even if Judas technically acted rightly from a Gods-eye view, given what he believed and the information he had available, he should have thought that his action was wrong. Let’s then disambiguate two senses of wrongness: The objective sense and the perspectival one. An act is objectively wrong iff it is wrong according to the correct moral theory, and vice versa for rightness. The perspectival sense of wrongness is a little harder to figure out.

Perspectival Wrongness

Consider the following:

1. Larry is standing in front of some trolley tracks, bla bla bla, he can pull the lever to save the 5 and kill 1, or let the 5 die by not pulling. He has read a lot of Kant, and is very convinced that it would be categorically wrong to pull the lever. Sadly his brain has shriveled up from watching too much shortform content, and he asks the Horse of Infinite Wisdom whether he should pull the lever, rather than doing what he thinks is right (the horse has no idea about anything):

(If you can’t see the video, the Horse of Infinite Wisdom is nodding in approval, meaning Larry pulls the lever.)

2. Mary is in the same situation as Larry. Like Larry, she has spent years and years studying moral philosophy, leading up to this very moment. Unluckily she is also very convinced by Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, and thinks it’s deeply morally wrong to pull the lever. But unlike Larry she actually does what she thinks is right, and pulls the lever.

Let’s suppose that the objectively right action here is to pull the lever. This would mean that Larry is actually the one acting rightly here. Nevertheless, it seems like there is some sense in which Mary is doing a much better job at doing the right thing here—namely the perspectival sense. While Larry is the one doing the right thing, it is actually Mary who’s acting rightly given what they know and believe. Thus we might say that perspectival rightness is just what you should think is right given your descriptive beliefs and normative commitments.

Perspectival rightness is not just a bed of roses, though. For instance, it assumes that we have fully coherent sets of credences, but I don’t think anyone has no contradictions in their beliefs/credences, which is a problem for there being any perspectival rightness. For example, if my beliefs entail that pushing a button both will and won’t kill 1000 people, then even if I have fully coherent normative beliefs, there won’t be any fact of the matter as to whether I should press the button. And things of course just get worse for inconsistent normative beliefs.

Also, we’re never just 100% certain of any particular ethical theory. If I’m say 60/40 between utilitarianism and Kantianism in the above example, it’s not clear how I should perspectivally act—I’m probably acting rightly by pulling the lever, but I’d be acting very wrongly on the 40% chance that Kantianism is right. So just like we need 1st-order decision theories to figure out how to act given descriptive uncertainty, we seem to need 2nd-order decision theories in order to figure out how to act given normative uncertainty. This is difficult in itself (though I have tried giving one such theory myself), but it also leads to a bit of a regress problem: Just like I’m not sure of any particular moral theory, I’m not sure of any particular 2nd-order decision theory. Thus I need a 3rd-order theory in the light of this uncertainty, and so on. But if I need a n+1st-order theory to figure out what I should think on the nth order (as I think the above suggests), then it seems like this regress is vicious. And even if not, I’ll never be able to figure out what I should do, since I’ll never reach the end, cus, you know, infinity and that.

All of these formal worries are interesting enough in themselves—and I suspect I might write on them in the future—but there is also another more pressing intuitive problem with this fully perspectival notion of wrongness:

A Tale as Old as the 1940’s Are Old

Heinrich Metzger is on a raid through Giesebrechtstraße, after his Hauptsturmführer received a tip that a Jewish family was hiding in one of the apartments. Him and his comrades are knocking on doors, performing improvised searches and questioning the residents, though most naturally deny having heard of such a thing.

As Heinrich is about to leave the apartment and proceed to search the neighbor, he spots what looks to be a torn off “Jude” badge in a half-open drawer. He of course knows what will happen to the family if he goes back and finds them: They’ll be rounded up and sent to some concentration camp where they’ll either starve to death, or some of his countrymen will do the job themselves. But these Jewish rats are the reason the country had been on a downward spiral in the past, and getting rid of them seems to be the only solution. And after all Jews are clearly an inferior race, and their interests have no weight in comparison with German people’s. Thus he “asks” if he can just look around a last time, and reports his findings to the Hauptsturmführer.

Question: Did Heinrich act wrongly here? Well he certainly seems to have acted objectively wrongly. But not only that; he surely acted wrongly in all morally relevant senses. On the above account of perspectival wrongness, however, he acted perspectivally perfectly! After all, he was very committed to the view that Jews don’t matter, and that they’re ruining society, etc.—and if all these were true, it would be right to do what he did. Still, there surely isn’t any respect we should care about in which he acted rightly.

Perhaps the Nazism example is too historically loaded. Suppose, then, that I sincerely thought that redheads didn’t matter—not because I thought they weren’t conscious—and I had no problem stabbing them for fun. Surely I’m not acting rightly here in any substantive sense whatsoever!

I thus think that full-blooded perspectival rightness is wrong. The problem is that you shouldn’t care about what’s right de dicto, but what’s right de re.³ That is, you should care about what’s actually right, not about acting rightly, whatever that turns out to be. To illustrate, suppose that you come across a person who’s been stabbed on the side of the road, during your evening stroll. Here you should obviously call an ambulance and try to help them. But consider the following two motivations for doing so:

1. It’s really bad for this person that they’re hurting, so I should try to help them out.

2. I believe that consequentialism is true, and consequentialism tells me that I should help this person under these circumstances. Thus I should help them out.

I think it’s clear that (1) is the right way of thinking about the situation! After all, it’s not that the reason it’s bad for this person that they’re bleeding out and that you should help them is that the correct moral theory says so; rather the correct moral theory says you should act this because it’s bad for them that they’re bleeding out and you should help them. So you should care about the things that are morally right, not about morality whatever it is.

Hence why Heinrich is acting wrongly: He is doing his best to act morally de dicto, but he should be caring about what actually matters, which includes Jews. Thus I think we should amend perspectival rightness to only account for descriptive mistakes: You act perspectivally rightly iff you do what would be right if the descriptive facts were as you believe.

But notice now that acting perspectivally rightly is simply the exact same as doing the best you can to act objectively rightly de re. Combined with the fact that perspectival rightness probably isn’t determinate for any real person, given inconsistent descriptive beliefs, this suggests to me that perspectival rightness isn’t a genuine moral property. What then? Well, I think it just stems from an attitude of approval or disapproval we have towards people in their attempts to act morally. Even if someone does the wrong thing due to faulty descriptive information, we can see that they are the sort of person who cares about the right things. But if someone acts on the wrong normative beliefs, they must not care about the right things.

This also fits nicely with Mary and Larry. On the amended version of perspectival rightness, Larry is actually doing nothing wrong, and Mary is! Still, the same intuition that suggests that Heinrich is doing something wrong suggests that Larry is doing a worse job here than Mary. This is because, even though Larry did the right thing, he didn’t act on the grounds that a person motivated by what’s actually right would. Mary also didn’t, but she at least showed care for morality—if only de dicto—and thus seems to have a character more prone to also be motivated by what’s right de re.

Likewise, if someone acts rightly given the information they had available, but they could’ve easily gotten more information, which would have suggested another course of action, they technically acted perspectivally rightly, but we can see that they are the sort of person who doesn’t care much about what’s actually right.

You might be able to craft some account that accomodates all these features, but I suspect it’ll either be very vague or highly complicated. Overall it thus seems to me that the only genuine moral property at play in all this is objective rightness—judgements of perspectival rightness are just proxies for whether someone is the type of person who would reliably act objectively rightly.

Wait, I feel like I’m forgetting someone…

So Did Judas Act Wrongly?

Oh yeah, poor Judas, this was about him! Although this post was clearly just a facade to talk about another topic I find interesting, let’s settle the ostensible question of the post. Did Judas do something wrong? In terms of objective wrongness, he almost certainly didn’t!⁴ In fact what he did might just have been one of the best actions ever.

As for perspectival wrongness, I just argued that perspectival wrongness isn’t real, and I stand by this. If I’m right here, then the question is settled: He did nothing wrong. Even so, you’re probably still justified in thinking he was something of a slimy character, being willing to betray his friend and all that.

But let’s for a moment—per impossibile—suppose that there is such a thing as perspectival rightness. In that case I think it would amount to the amended account above (or something close enough), taking only descriptive mistakes into account. Then whether Judas acted wrongly will depend on his beliefs at the time of acting.

I think we can be quite sure that he didn’t believe that Jesus would rise from the dead and atone for our sins, etc., so it looks like he might have acted wrongly—betraying your friend is generally wrong so long as it doesn’t have huge positive side effects. However, he might plausibly have had other beliefs that made is action perspectivally right overall.

I’m obviously just spitballing here, as we can’t know his motivations and beliefs for sure. The thing is, as well as not believing that Jesus would rise and so on, I think it’s quite probable that he also no longer believed that Jesus was the messiah, as that seems like the best explanation for why he would betray Jesus. But if Jesus weren’t the messiah, it might very well be right to get rid of him, as he is converting a bunch of people following a false messiah, and causing unrest—as well as using expensive anointing oil on himself, rather than giving it to the poor. Though having him crucified may still be a bit much.

So Judas didn’t act wrongly on the objective front, and even if perspectival rightness exists, he might have been ok there as well. But who am I to judge, anyways? We live in a society, so I should let you—the people—decide! Cast your votes:

1. I apologize to God, this is not intended as blasphemy.

2. Some believe the following gospel to be apocryphal, but I think they’re just haters.

3. This idea is from Brian Weatherson’s Running Risks Morally, in which he steals the idea from Michael Smiths The Moral Problem (the latter of which I haven’t read).

4. Perhaps you think that the correct moral theory takes the beliefs of agents as descriptive inputs, rather than the actual state of the world, in which case amended perspectival wrongness would be exactly the same as objective wrongness. Even though I recently expressed support for such an idea, I think it ultimately fails due to issues of inconsistent and incoherent beliefs, as well as because it might make deliberately avoiding relevant information the right thing to do.